Poor performance with Windows 2008 Guest OS using ESX

[clay28]

Hello, I browsed the forum earlier today and couldn't find a solution so I thought I would throw it out there and see if anybody could give me a tip or some advice on improving performance on my ESX server (point me to a document, that would be great). Basically, here is what I got:

I'm seeing extremely poor performance on my 4 Virtual Machines (Guest OS = Windows 2008). All I have done is install Windows 2008 Enterprise and the performance is extremely slow. It took almost 3 hours to install Windows 2008 on the 4th VM. Even when I want to execute applications like Server Roles and Features, it is very slow.

Here is my hardware / virtual settings:

Hardware:

Dell SC1435, 16GB MEM, 2xAMD 2.0 GHz Operteron 2212 HE. (memory is not node interleaving). RAID 1 with 235 GB (SAS Drives)

My 4 VMs....

Virtual Setup:

VM #1 - Win2008 Enterprise, 86x, 1GB Memory, 16GB Virtual hard dIsk

VM #2 - Win2008 Enterprise, 64x, 512MB, 16GB Virtual hard disk

VM #3 - Win2008 Enterprise, 86x 1GB Memory, 16GB Virtual hard disk and 30GB virtual hard disk

VM #4 - Win2008 Enterprise, 86x, 1GB Memory, 16GB Virtual hard disk

I checked Task Manager and it looks OK. I viewed some of the performance tabs -- CPU and Processor utilization looks OK. I think the issue is IO (probably disk) but I looked at the Disk IO didn't look bad. When I build out the VMs, I pretty much took defaults (Haven't adjusted any of the settings).

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

[oreeh]

FYI: this thread has been moved to the Virtual Machine and Guest OS forum.

Oliver Reeh[/i]

[VMware Communities User Moderator|http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-2444][/i]

[wila]

You probably did this already, but have you installed vmware-tools into all of your guest OS's?

--

Wil

[Watch22]

I don't know what to tell you on your performance problem. I'm running 12 Windows 2008 and Windows 2008 Core servers on our Vmware ESX 3.5 Update 1 Farm and everything runs fast. It sounds like you have a disk bottleneck somewhere that it would take 3 hours to install the OS. When are your ISO's comming from when you install? I also add the following line to al of our Windows 2008 and Vista boxes. "netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled" Since our Cisco switches don't support this, it makes the boxes snappy on the network.

[oreeh]

FYI: this thread has been moved to the Performance Forum.

Oliver Reeh[/i]

[VMware Communities User Moderator|http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-2444][/i]

[fizbinboy]

We are experiencing the same problem as the OP. Multiple Win2008 clients have been installed, and all of them work very poorly. While performance monitors on both the VMWare side and the Windows 2008 OS side show no unusual activity, the clients all regularly hang for extended periods. All have VMWare Tools installed. For now any plans to roll out Windows 2008 are on hold. This is not an issue where we have Windows 2008 installed on stand-alone servers.

Any advice/tips greatly appreciated.

[Qjack]

I am facing similar but not an exact problem. I have applications like apache, tomcat running on Windows 2008 which is in turn hosted on ESX VM. Not sure what is the reason for tomcat application to spike to 60-70% CPU. i have same setup on Win 2003 and works fine.

[obriensl]

we have issues with windows 2008 and vista guest os systems, but its more of a user experience issue at this point. mouse is slow to respond, and the users are complaining of general sluggishness, especially if they are doing rdp in from offsite. we don't have that issue with windows 2003 and xp. we have applied every suggested fix we've found people throwing out there, but nothing seems to really fix this.

[s1xth]

I have multiple 2K8 servers running (12, all NON SP2) and there have been some small issues, the biggest being the decreased performance. I had to give some server more vcpus' to get better performance, as when they are physicall they dont use nearly as much. Its odd. BUT there are ton of possible contributing factors. I'd say out of the 12 we are running now in full production, 2 run slower than 2K3, and not as great performance overall across all 2K8's. Things got slightly better on U4, not sure how it is on vSphere. I am still in testing with that and havent had a chance to load a 2k8 server yet.

[fizbinboy]

We were told by VMWare support that this is a known issue in ESX 3.5 and that the fix is to upgrade to version 4.

[s1xth]

Upgrade to ESXi 4.0 or 3.5 update 4????

Sent from my iPhone

On Jul 21, 2009, at 11:33 AM, fizbinboy <communities-

[fizbinboy]

ESX 4. We have not done so yet so I cannot verify that this works.

[s1xth]

So let me get this straight, VMware is ADMITTING that there are performance related problems with W2K8 under ESXi 3.5?? Across the board?

[fizbinboy]

Correct.

[s1xth]

Any detailed reasoning as to why? I have a lot of W2K8 servers VM'd...wish I would have known that...

[fizbinboy]

I am not the VMWare guy where I work. The guy who is made the call to support and my understanding is that it was fairly short - basically 'Yep, we are aware of that and it is fixed in ESX 4.'

[jozsef]

Hi Clay

It appears your DELL system is not supported according to HCL - All versions of esx from 3.0 upwards.

I suggest you build ESX on something thats supported. Your system specs are fine for 4 VMs I recon.

Must be a hardware setting or lack thereof in the BIOS perhaps, which is why you get dismal performance.

Windows 2008 runs fine on my ESX Cluster with default install. Never had any issues with performance 3.5.

Regards

Joe